"Ugh," she coughed, spit and blood collecting at the corners of her mouth. She clutched her stomach. Something that felt like anger coated the inside of her torso like molton tar. She knotted the fabric of her t-shirt in her fingers, twisting and pulling the cotton around her knuckles.
She looked out the gray, gray window with burning eyes. Her typically bright clear stare was replaced by something dull and listless. Veins pulsed red in her sclera.
"AAAAAAAUUUGHHH." She growled with a gnarled and dirty voice as she rose on unsturdy feet. She crossed the room and reached out in a staccato manner, then grabbed a decaying bookshelf in her dry, chapped hands and yanked it brutally to the floor. Musty, yellowed love stories crashed and splintered on the ground. Dust and paper burst into the heavy air, shrouding the room in a depressing snow. The fragments floated downwards almost angelically before settling on the ruins of demolished furniture and lost hope.
The waning sunlight that came through the window barely warmed her withered shoulders. It didn't reflect in her hair anymore. Everything she ate tasted like vomit and dust. Her fingers were perpetually plagued by slivers of old wood and dark circles sagged beneath her lethargic eyes.
She knelt by the remains of the former bookshelf, the crack of her knees starkly echoing, and stared, long and hard, at all that was ruined. Without thought, she reached out a pale hand and allowed her fingertips to sift through the surface of splintered boards and torn paper. Before she knew it, she was wrist deep in wreckage, pulling out and setting aside tattered papers, reassembling them. She didn't know why she was doing it. It didn't even occur to her to think about why she was doing it. It wasn't a puzzle or an act of regret; it was moreso a residual haunting inside of her just going through the motions of placing things where they belonged, returning things to their original states.
Having done it thousands of times before, she pushed the pieces of paper together, reforming love letters and old diary pages. A wilted smile tugged at the corners of her cracked lips as her gaze danced over the scrawled writing, as memories started blossoming, as her heart began to beat again.
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